The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 eBook

Early in 1735 the settlement of Newbury (then spelled
Newberry) was begun. In a little over three years
a colony was sent out across the Merrimac. The
plantation was at first called merely from the name
of the river. In 1639 it was named Colchester
by the General Court; but October 7, 1640, this name
was changed to Salisbury, so that in 1638, almost two
hundred and fifty years ago, Salisbury began to be
settled. It seemed as if there was need of new
settlements at that time to counteract the depletions
in the Old World, for the Thirty Years’ War was
still impoverishing Germany; Richelieu was living
to rule France in the name of his royal master, Louis
XIII; England was gathering up those forces of good
and evil which from resisting tyranny at last grew
intoxicated with power, and so came to play the tyrant
and regicide. For it was about that time that
Charles I had disbanded his army, trusting to the
divinity that, in the eyes of the Stuarts, did ever
hedge a king, and at the same time thrown away his
honor by pledging himself to what he never meant to
perform. While this farce, which preceded the
tragedy, was being set upon the stage of history,
here, three thousand miles away, nature had begun
to build up the waste, and to prophesy growth.

Salisbury, and afterwards Amesbury, were named from
the two towns so famous in England, the Salisbury
Plain of Druidical memory, on which is the celebrated
Stonehenge, and near by, the Amesbury where was one
of the oldest monasteries in England. It is supposed
that the towns were so named because many of the new
settlers came from those old English towns. The
latter name used to be spelled Ambresbury, and Tennyson
in his “Idylls of the King” spells Almesbury.
After the discovery by Modred of the guilt of King
Arthur’s fair and false wife, he says:—­

“Queen Guinevere had fled the court
and sat
There in the holyhouse at Almesbury
Weeping.”

Describing her flight, he tells us that she sent Lancelot

“Back to his land, but she to Almesbury
Fled all night long by glimmering waste
and weald.”

There Arthur sees her for the last time and mourns
over her before he goes forth to his last battle with
Modred.

On the whole, it is not strange, considering its associations,
and moreover the fact that this town in Massachusetts
is the only Amesbury in America while so many other
names are duplicated, that the people of Amesbury
are not willing to merge the name of their town into
that of the elder sister, even when those parts called
in each “the Mills” are so closely united
in interests and in appearance that no stranger could
recognize them as two towns. It is only the Powow
that makes the dividing line here. Blocks of
offices and stores on both sides of the street, among
them the post-office, common to both towns, hide the
narrow stream at that point, and further up and down
the towering walls of the factories make it unobserved.
It is not here that one sees the Powow. But there
is, or a little time ago there was, a place not far
off from this main street where the river is still
harassed, yet as it slips past in its silent toil
with a few trees hanging low on the right, it has
a fascination in spite of its prosaic surroundings;
it takes naturally to picturesqueness and freedom.